Another excerpt from my memoir, Rocket Lessons. Newton’s First Law of Motion: An object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. Mitch’s Corollary: Become an unbalanced force and beat the Reds into space. Cutting off his finger at the age of twelve must have turned my father into a worrier, but as always, he turned it to good use when he became the project manager for rocket design…
I started this blog at the suggestion of my agent, who thought blogging excerpts from my memoir of growing up as a rocket kid would be a good idea. And yet, thanks to the readers of this blog, it’s turned ever more toward poetry and away from prose. Today, I offer the opening of one chapter of Rocket Lessons — a kind of prose poem. Fog: Launch ScrubbedEinstein’s Theory of Relativity: Due to the natural…
I had the privilege of being invited to appear on Poets’ Co-Op TV show on Channel 54 in Boulder County, Colorado, on September 5. M.D. Friedman, a poet, artist, and musician, hosts this monthly poetry show. He had also invited me to give a reading in his series at the Loveland Museum, which was great fun. It’s a lovely venue and a good group of poets regularly attend. It’s interesting to watch yourself reading. I’m…
Working on a novel set in Italy reminded me of my poem about Venice. I love poems of place, especially Elizabeth Bishop’s South America poems. Wearing Venice I have taken to wearing Veniceon my wrist. Beads of glass with foil hearts dangle from my hand as I jogaround a geometrical landscape ruled by science and not art.I have crafted a bracelet of glassto wear a city water whisks,echoing through airy loggias, sloshing on slimed stones,dazzling…
This is a thank you letter to everyone who kindly came to hear me read in Colorado. I read first at the Loveland Museum, where the open mic portion was unique and fascinating. Then I was on M.D. Friedman’s local tv poetry show, The Poet’s Co-op TV Show. It was a blast, though I didn’t know which camera to look into, but all cameras (and camera operators) looked friendly. If you live in Boulder County,…
I’m in Colorado, mixing business, pleasure, and poetry readings. The first one I did here was at the Loveland Museum, as part of the Internet Poets Coop Series, run by poet, musician, and artist M.D. Friedman. The evening began with an open mic — an unusual arrangement, as usually the featured reader is first and open mic second — which allowed me to hear some Colorado poet voices before giving my reading. It was fun…
I’ve heard it likened to creating a quilt the size of a soccer field (Jane Vandenburgh), to cantilevering out a floor built on nothing underneath (Annie Dillard), to a feral beast kept in a room (Dillard again), and perhaps my favorite quote is from Somerset Maugham, who said there are three secrets to writing a novel and no one knows what they are. All these are true in my current experience of working on a…
I was going to spend an hour this morning before work playing with a poem revision, but the gardening service our condo association has hired has a crew full of men wielding the loudest instruments I’ve ever heard: edgers, mowers, and blowers. And they have no pattern of work, perhaps finishing our side of the complex all at once, then moving to the next area. First, the edger comes along, with a noise like a…
I’ve been thinking about ekphrastic poetry again lately, how much I enjoy poems that use paintings as touchstones. I’m a big fan of a wonderful illustrated book by Lynne Knight called Snow Effects after an exhibition called “Impressionists in Winter” that came through San Francisco some years ago. My father was a painter, and I’m sure that watching him gave me ideas about creativity. This is one of my poems based on paintings, from my…
A Walk After Reading Dante’s Paradiso We live in a heaven we take great pains to avoid. Shielding our cheeks from a winter sky’s chilled fur, we hunch against the brush of air that has rushed gloriously everywhere. We listen into our phones so as not to be pierced by arias in the pines. Clench worry’s hands to keep a woodpecker’s drumming from entering our bones. Stay separate. Refuse to sail a cloud into evening’s…